Pyre

When you opened your eyes on the world for the first time as a child

How brilliant the colors were, what a jewel the Sun was

What marvel the stars, how incredibly alive the trees were

And to love again and again, and have people to whom we are deeply attached

Go to sleep and never wake up

And the laughter echoes only in one's mind

But then the echo goes, the memory, the traces are all gone

All your efforts, all your achievements

All your attainments turning into dust, nothingness

What is the feeling? What happens to you?

The idea of God as the potter, the architect of the universe

It makes you feel that life is, after all, important

That there is someone who cares

It has meaning, it has sense

And you are valuable in the eyes of the father

But after a while it got embarrassing

(The superstition, the myth, the absolutely unfounded idea)

(Why does anybody believe that?)

So you become an atheist, and then you feel terrible after that

Because you got rid of God, but that means you got rid of yourself

You're just nothing but a machine

And your idea that you're a machine is just a machine too

(A machine in the system)

So if you think that that's the way things are, you feel hostile to the world

You feel that the world is a neurological trap

Into which you somehow got caught, trapped

You run from the maternity ward to the crematorium and that's it, that's it

So if you're a smart kid you commit suicide

(Now I want to propose another idea all together)

The real you, is not a puppet which life pushes around

The real you, the real deep down you, is the whole universe

You cannot confine yourself to what happens inside the skin

Your skin doesn't separate you from the world, it's a bridge

But just as a magnet polarizes its-self in north and south but its all one magnet

So experience polarizes itself as self and other, but it's all one

(Anyone? Believe!)

(But it's all one)

What you call the "external world" is as much you as your own body

(It's anyone? Believe!)

(But it's all one)

Most people think that when they open their eyes and look around

That what they are seeing is outside

(It's anyone?)

It seems, doesn't it, that you are behind your eyes

(It's all one)

(It's anyone?)

We haven't realized that life and death, black and white, good and evil

Being and non-being, come from the same center

When you look for your own particularized center of being

Which is separate from everything else, you won't be able to find it

The only way you'll know it isn't there is if you look hard enough

To find out that it isn't there

It isn't there at all, there isn't a separate you

There are, in physical reality, no such things as separate events

People can't be talked out of illusions

If a person believes that the earth is flat

You can't talk him out of that, he knows that it's flat

He'll go down to the window and see that it's obvious, it looks flat

So the only way to convince him that it isn't is to say

Well, let's go and find the edge